As you may have noticed, we are currently undergoing some changes here on The Urban Country. We have moved from our old blogging platform (Blogger) to a new platform (WordPress).

While we are at it we are cleaning up and simplifying the website design to provide a better user experience. The new template uses a responsive design with HTML5 that can adapt to both desktop and mobile clients.

The entire migration process may take a few days to finalize, so please bear with us while we work through the issues and get everything back to normal.

All of our existing content and comments should now be available, so feel free to browse the site using the new template.

We still have a few remaining tasks, including migrating thumbnail images for posts, activating Disqus comments, setting up browsable categories as well as miscellaneous cleanup tasks.

Please let us know if you like the simplified look and feel. We would love to hear your feedback.

Thanks!

James Schwartz – Editor/Publisher, The Urban Country

http://waterloobikes.ca Graham

Looks great!

http://www.mysensitivegirlhole.blogspot.com Jen H

Is the migration painful? I’ve been thinking about it and procrastinating on the exploration…time is so limited right now.

http://www.theurbancountry.com James Schwartz

The migration itself was straightforward. It automatically imports content and comments. I started late last night and finished this morning. There are some little things to watch out for though:
- It’s hard to get the URLs to be exactly like Blogger. Most are the same but there are still a few pages that are different. Thankfully WordPress will redirect users to the new URLs, but it would be nice if the URLs were the same so that the social sharing links had the same counts.
- Auto creating thumbnails for old content isn’t easy. There are tools but they don’t work as expected (at least in my case)

Those were the two biggest issues for me. Everything else was pretty easy to setup.

Cheers,
James

George

the new design looks amazing! Great job, James!
- g

http://www.theurbancountry.com James Schwartz

Thanks George! Though credit for the design should go to the WordPress theme. I have done some tweaks, but most of my time has been spent on migration issues & setting up widgets.